Train delays cause more man-hour losses than strikes

Atul Thakur, TNNMar 22, 2008, 04.19am IST

NEW DELHI: "Your Rolex watch might let you down, but not the Frontier Mail," went a popular saying in the elite circles of the 1930s. So much so that a 15-minute delay on one day in August 1929 was enough to cause a major hullabaloo.

On March 11 this year, the same train, now known as the Golden Temple Mail, was 27 minutes late at New Delhi station coming from Amritsar and 18 minutes late while coming from Mumbai, but nobody thought it unusual.

It is now so much of a given that trains will be behind schedule that we hardly realise the number of man-hours lost to delayed trains. But, a random check by TOI on a single day in Delhi shows that the number of man-days lost to delayed trains in the Capital alone is double the number lost to all strikes in India each year. This is how we reached this stunning conclusion:

We picked a date at random - in this case on Tuesday, March 11. All the 177 mail or express trains that arrived at any of the Capital's major stations - Old Delhi, New Delhi and Hazrat Nizamuddin - were tracked.

We found that more than eight out of every 10 mail or express trains that arrived at these stations on that date - midnight to midnight - were delayed.

Only 29 of the 177 trains made it at the scheduled time. Even among the elite Rajdhani and Shatabdi trains, just four of the 20 that arrived at the Delhi stations in the 24-hour period reached on time.

The average delay for all 177 express and mail trains that came to Delhi on that Tuesday was 83 minutes. One was even more than 12 hours late. Remember, this includes only the mail and express trains, not the passenger trains or the EMUs.

What does this average delay of 83 minutes for 177 mail and express trains translate into in terms of man-hours lost? We assumed a typical train of this kind has about 10 sleeper-class coaches, six air-conditioned ones and three general coaches. The total capacity works out to a little less than 1,100 passengers.

Now assume that not all berths are occupied. The figure we assumed was an average of 900 passengers per train. That means the loss of roughly 2.2 lakh man-hours on that one day.

To make sense of that figure, here's a yardstick you could use. If Tuesday was an average day in Delhi, that number of man-hours lost through the year would be over eight crore. Divide that number by eight and you have over one crore man-days lost to delayed mail and express trains at just three major Delhi stations. That is almost twice the number of man-days lost because of industrial strikes, which was 56 lakh in 2006.

Now extrapolate that figure to the entire Railway network and it becomes obvious that an unthinkable number of man-days are lost to the delayed trains that we, of course, dismiss as routine.